I agree with the tone of your post. Voting doesn’t work very effectively, in all sorts of situations (e.g., Bush x2). I do kind of like the slashdot style system where maybe you can mark a post from a list of flags, e.g., insightful, funny, intelligent, etc, and perhaps add in a few negative or critical flags like (juvenile, trivial, poorly worded, etc.)
I think these changes would encourage a more holistic evaluation of responses and would work to avoid the overall gruffness, and over-priming effect related to the current system.
Edit: Even better, you could attach a +1 signifier to positive indications (intelligent, insightful, etc.), and a −1 signifier to negative indications (poorly worded, juvenile, etc.), and then enforce that whenever someone votes, they must include a flag. Then, when displaying total points, they should take the average over all categories, so that the only truly negative posts are those which are extremely dynamically poor, i.e., poor in every category.
I agree with the tone of your post. Voting doesn’t work very effectively, in all sorts of situations (e.g., Bush x2). I do kind of like the slashdot style system where maybe you can mark a post from a list of flags, e.g., insightful, funny, intelligent, etc, and perhaps add in a few negative or critical flags like (juvenile, trivial, poorly worded, etc.)
I think these changes would encourage a more holistic evaluation of responses and would work to avoid the overall gruffness, and over-priming effect related to the current system.
Edit: Even better, you could attach a +1 signifier to positive indications (intelligent, insightful, etc.), and a −1 signifier to negative indications (poorly worded, juvenile, etc.), and then enforce that whenever someone votes, they must include a flag. Then, when displaying total points, they should take the average over all categories, so that the only truly negative posts are those which are extremely dynamically poor, i.e., poor in every category.